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T. K. Seung, Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spake Zarathustra

Reviewed by Robin Small

As commentaries on Thus Spake Zarathustra
have become common, their standard has become steadily higher. The
influence of the major works of Stanley Rosen, Laurence Lampert, Robert
Gooding-Williams, and other writers will be felt in Nietzsche
scholarship for many years to come. One consequence is that a tour guide
is no longer enough: readers will look for an interpretation that sets
out to throw new light on Nietzsche's text, providing a basis for
further debate over its meaning. T. K. Seung's book satisfies this
requirement. Its title signals the author's approach to Z: the
book has a single literary form and a religious, or at least spiritual,
theme as its content. Seung makes his case with some panache, backing it
up with a reading of the work that displays an intensive engagement
with Nietzsche's text.

The main philosophical theme of Z, Seung believes, is the
conflict between two concepts: the sovereign individual and the
deterministic universe. In fact, he regards the course of modern
European culture as defined by the tension between these ideas, which
amount to complete worldviews, designated as 'Faustian' and 'Spinozan'.
Nietzsche's protagonist Zarathustra re-enacts this struggle in his own
journey. Seung believes that in order to find overall coherence in Z, we need to assign the work to a literary genre. He nominates the epic
as the most appropriate genre. It follows from this premise that
Zarathustra's development in the work must lead to a victorious
conclusion. This event, appearing as the triumph not only of Zarathustra
as epic hero but also of Nietzsche as author, is in due course
described and celebrated by Seung. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul is thus able to end with the satisfying sense of a 'mission accomplished'.

Yet Zarathustra's career is not as straightforward as this suggests. His
repeated attempts to become a Faustian hero all end in failure, because
the autonomous will cannot withstand the terrifying power of causal
necessity. Seung frequently claims that determinism annihilates all
meaning and value in life, making the point through forceful assertion
rather than argument. Anyone who does not find determinism deeply
threatening in this personal sense may learn from Seung's textual
analyses, but will probably find much of his main argument unpersuasive,
given its dependence on this central theme. However, Spinoza's cosmic
naturalism presents a different model of life and the world, bringing
the two together in a union that enables us to identify ourselves with
nature and its absolute necessity. This is precisely the end of
Zarathustra's journey. A failure as a Faustian superman, he is
eventually reborn as a Spinozan superman, abandoning his individual self
in favour of a divine "cosmic self." (xviii) The work ends with
Zarathustra's initiation into a mystery religion, a Dionysian pantheism
involving ecstatic experiences and ritual worship of 'Mother Nature'.
Philosophically, this nature-religion is a blend of Spinozan naturalism
and "Buddhism naturalized" (273), to which Seung adds some of the more
obscure ideas of C. G. Jung, including the positively Lovecraftian
"chthonic force."

The successive stages of Zarathustra's epic journey are presented by Seung as corresponding to the four parts of Z.
In Part One the Faustian self is advanced as master of reality:
Zarathustra wants humanity to transcend the banal satisfactions of
secular culture and attain the higher ideal represented by the superman.
His "spiritual campaign" (49) aims at a development of the spirit
through the three stages symbolized by the camel, lion, and child, and
by the final chapter he seems to have completed his mission. The mood of
Part Two, however, is far darker. A wounded and disillusioned
Zarathustra now wants to defeat his enemies rather than to benefit
humanity. He attributes his suffering to the imprisonment of the
creative will by the immovable past, over which we have no control and
yet which determines all that is to come. What Seung calls the
forward-looking autonomous will is overpowered by the backward-looking
heteronomous will, and this part ends on a note of gloom and self-doubt.
Part Three renews the conflict and begins a process of redemption
unrealized until Part Four. This redemption consists in a shift from the
temporal self, which is inevitably defeated by the world that it
strives to dominate, to the eternal cosmic self, which stands in no such
danger since it encompasses whatever has any claim to reality.

Part Four of Z has always had a mixed reception. As Seung notes,
many commentators regard the end of Part Three as the work's real
conclusion, with Part Four added as a sort of afterthought on
Nietzsche's part, or perhaps in line with an ancient Greek custom of
following a tragedy with a contrasting satyr play. (Richard Wagner had
made a similar claim for the status of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.)
Paul Loeb's proposal to interpolate Part Four into Part Three is, as
Seung astutely remarks, another way to maintain the “tripartite reading”
(340). He objects that if the work is seen as ending with Part Three,
then the existential crisis that overtakes Zarathustra when he confronts
his 'abysmal thought' must remain unresolved. This claim implies a
particular interpretation of Part Three's final chapter, "The Seven
Seals," for which Seung makes a strong case in another impressive piece
of careful reading. Another possibility is that Z does not have
an ending that ties up its loose ends. Seung would object that in that
case, it lacks an essential feature of the epic genre and, what is more,
fails to provide the closure readers are entitled to expect from what
is essentially a "great psychological drama" (337).

In accordance with Seung's claim that Part Four contains the answers to
the work's riddles, a detailed analysis concludes the commentary. Even
those who do not locate the 'higher men' among Nietzsche's most
compelling creations will learn something here. Seung's case depends
above all on presenting the culminating Ass Festival as a revelatory
spiritual experience. He builds on Kathleen Higgins' commentary in her
book Nietzsche's Zarathustra (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), which explored parallels with The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius, a broad comedic work with an unexpectedly spiritual turn at its conclusion. As in Gustav Naumann's Zarathustra-Commentar (Leipzig: Verlag von H. Haeffel, 1899–1901) and Julian Young's recent Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) attention is also given
to the Ass Festival's similarity to medieval Feasts of Fools that
represented a survival of the Dionysian cult as a subversive influence
within Christian culture. Seung is quite serious about the religious
aspect of this passage, envisaging a cultic worship of 'Mother Nature'
as the proposal intended by Nietzsche, marking the difference between
his pantheism and Spinoza's (304).

It is evident from the start that Seung intends to locate Z
within an ambitious account of Western philosophy as a whole. So did
Martin Heidegger, of course, but Seung's philosophical agenda, focusing
on the problem of freedom, is more obtrusive. The distinction between
figure and ground is often blurred as Seung invokes other philosophers
in an immediate fashion, so that Nietzsche is not just integrated but
almost submerged in a broader current of Western thinking. Writers he
barely knew of, such as the Young Hegelians, are claimed to be closely
related: for example, we are told that various ideas in Z are
"derived from," "an adaptation of," and even "right out of" Ludwig
Feuerbach (11, 24, and 86). In fact, Nietzsche mentions Feuerbach in his
works only as an early influence on Wagner, hardly a direct
relationship. The claims made by Seung need more support than an appeal
to the working of a Zeitgeist on the next generation, but this is never really provided.

The genre approach to the work has its own problems. Seung presents himself not just as an interpreter but as a champion of Z
and, in consequence, of its heroic protagonist. He defends Zarathustra
against any imputation of untoward conduct: "It is inconceivable for him
to express his passionate longing for a marriage to a total stranger"
(227). Zarathustra's flirtations (however inconclusive) with a
succession of female figures are of some concern, but doubts about his
fidelity are eased by deciding that Life and Eternity are the same
person. One objection would be that this partiality rules out any
perception of Zarathustra's role as a "Don Juan of knowledge" (D
327), made evident in "The Convalescent" by the appearance of his
"abysmal thought," in response to an ill-advised invitation on his part,
as a menacing and hand-gripping "stone guest." Seung's determination to
type-cast Zarathustra as an epic (not tragic) hero locks him into a
framework that tends to limit and bias his readings. At worst,
Zarathustra can meet with some obstacles and temporary setbacks on his
path toward final triumph. This does not altogether eliminate the work's
dramatic tensions, but it does reduce their force.

Seung appears to best advantage when engaged in a close reading of Z.
He draws attention to things that others have overlooked, and makes
points that throw new light on the ideas and themes. He also engages in
lively debate and disagreement with other American commentators, often
coming out ahead. For an observer these encounters are rather
entertaining, quite apart from what may be learned from them. The reader
is given the privilege of overhearing a conversation between well-read
and imaginative scholars whose varied readings of Nietzsche's text are
set in mutual competition. Even when one does not agree with Seung's
decisions, his accounts of these debates are informative and worthwhile.

Further, some of Seung's interpretative comments show sharp insight. For
example, commenting on the repeated use of 'If…' in "The Seven Seals"
(a passage starting with Wenn ich ein Wahrsager bin…) he suggests that the German word wenn
could be translated not as 'if' but as 'even if' or 'even when' (232).
One should note that the passage parallels Martin Luther's German
translation of 1 Cor. 13, starting: Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engelzungen redete…
Given this fact, Seung is surely right in his reading of the text and
in his helpful suggestion for its translation. One could readily go
through the book and find other cases in point.

Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul is at its least convincing, I think,
when the author introduces, without any elaboration, what look like his
personal evaluations of well-known philosophical positions. An example
will show what is meant. Seung writes: "Scientific reduction is to
reduce the phenomena (for example, consciousness) of a higher level to
those (for example, the brain state) of a lower level. Hence it is a
descent from a higher to a lower level" (90). This is bad enough, but it
soon appears that scientific reductionism has an even more malign
consequence:

On the other hand, reductionism reduces all living
things to dead matter. The living things are only the epiphenomena of
dead matter. Life is only an illusion and a surface phenomenon.
Scientific reduction kills not only God, but all living things. The
whole world becomes a dungeon of death, which encounters Zarathustra in
his nightmare. (91)

As a commentary on "The Soothsayer," this is so arbitrary that it
undermines the many passages where Seung offers worthwhile analyses of
Nietzsche's text. In any case, it is hard to take seriously as
philosophical reflection. Dramatic talk of 'higher' and 'lower,' or
'living and dead,' serves to express personal feelings and preferences
but throws no real light on the theoretical issues surrounding
reductionism.

The irony of this particular polemic is that Seung's own interpretive
strategy is nothing if not reductive. The systematic unity that he wants
to find in Z requires drawing together the various chapters,
despite their sharp contrasts in style and content. Seung explains this
as a search for "sequential meaning" (63). It is carried out, in part,
by numerous assimilations of ideas between and within chapters. Thus,
for instance, he holds that the dwarf in "On the Vision and Riddle" is
the same as the black snake, the philosopher's stone, the rock at
Surlei, the heteronomous will, the abysmal thought of eternal return,
and a part of Zarathustra, his "earthly animal self." (126–32).
Similarly, Life is also Mother Nature, Eternity, Dionysus, Pan, the
cosmic self, and probably all of the above as well (229, 205, 277, 216,
and 209). In the end, the book's many images and figures seem to come
down to a few, or perhaps only one, the cosmic totality. Many readers,
it seems to me, will end by finding this more confusing than
enlightening.

It is disconcerting to find oneself with such mixed feelings over a book
that appears to have received favorable comments from leading American
scholars. One wonders whether its approach has an appeal to them that it
lacks for audiences elsewhere. Yet Seung presents himself as writing
for a general audience. Hence, his interpretation needs to be assessed
in terms of its main claims: that the central theme of Z is the
conflict between freedom and determinism, which is a dominating problem
for modern Western culture as well, and that its direction is towards a
cosmic naturalism or pantheism that in turn lends itself to innovative
religious observances, promoting a mystical union with Mother Nature.

One aspect of his account seems especially out of keeping with Nietzsche's thought, as found in Z
and elsewhere. This is the privileging of what Seung calls the "eternal
perspective" (219 and 315). It is not very surprising that the
intensely temporal notion of recurrence is discounted by Seung as
"naïve" and "ludicrous" if taken at face value. Rather, he argues, the
thought is merely a "poetic device" for conveying the full impact of
determinism (187). Like several other writers, he identifies eternal
recurrence with circular time. Hence, he believes that the dwarf in "On
the Vision and Riddle" gives a correct description of time, which
Zarathustra then adopts and passes off as his own. Seung emphasizes that
the 'eternal ring' is not a separate reality but a different
perspective on the same world. Nevertheless, it is a timeless realm
within which "nothing happens or becomes" and "all things are eternally
present" (326).

This metaphysical doctrine is certainly one solution to the vexatious
problem of what Zarathustra calls "time and its 'It was'" (which is not
just a consequence of causal determinism, since even indeterminists
allow that nobody can act on the past). The issue is simply dissolved,
for there is no past or future in the divine reality, but only eternal
presence. It is a startling doctrine to find attributed to Nietzsche of
all people, the professed champion of an uncompromising Heracliteanism,
for whom "It is of time and becoming that the best parables should
speak." ("Upon the Blessed Isles") Yet the combination of "Spinoza's
naturalism and Buddhism naturalized" (273) that Seung sees as the
solution to the problem he takes as central to Z provides only this outcome. For this and other reasons, one comes away from Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul
having encountered a different Nietzsche, interesting in various ways
but not always easy to identify with the important thinker of that name.